[crossfire] New plugin: citylife - help needed

[Juha Jäykkä]

>   If I'm running a private server and don't log in for a few days, it would
> be annoying for all the shops to be closed.

This should not be a problem: it should be easy to only count "active" ticks 
(i.e. ticks when someone is actually logged on to the server) when 
considering which shops thrive and which die.

>   Related to that you are likely to get some towns that may not be used
> much even on active servers - if I have a private server, I'm likely only
> working in one town at a time.

This is more difficult. Perhaps the npcs themselves could help with this? 
Perhaps the npcs could be made to go to the shops as well? They might not 
need to buy anything, just enter and exit. Also, their influence in 
determining whether a shop lives or dies could be made orders of magnitude 
lower than players' influence.

What I have in mind, is that if no player visits a shop in Scorn, the npcs can 
keep the shops alive, but as soon as players start visiting the shops, 
their "vote" counts so much more that if players do not go to shop A at all, 
the npcs' influence can't keep that alive. Some kind of differential metric 
between the shops, not an absolute one. An npc entering the shop is worth 
one "life point" for the shop, while a player is worth a 100. Then, whenever 
the lowest scoring shop is, say, 1000 points below the next lowest scoring, 
it dies. Also, this means that whenever the highest scoring shop is that 1000 
above the next, it should expand its business...

> that driven more my player actions - eg, folks can by plots of lands
> outside of cities, etc or what not.

This sounds nice. But... how do we keep track of who owns what? And how do the 
players find out if the beautiful spot they fancy is already owned by 
someone?

>   At some level, if we let a player do it, then we could also let NPC's do
> it (some number of NPC's buy farms or whatever)

Naturally, the npcs must basically be able to do whatever the players do. I'd 
like to see them enter dungeons themselves and join parties with players as 
well. Though the last type of npc probably would not be controlled by the sim 
code (if we choose to use that). (And I do not count the current hired hands 
in Scorn as npcs. They do nothing unless you hire them - not really very "c" 
in npc.)

-Juha

-- 
		 -----------------------------------------------
		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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